Club Inferno (2013)

Ten years ago, Beatrice Godeux opened Club Inferno in the Wedding district of Berlin as a luxury class club with glamorous Las Vegas style. Shortly after Beatrice's unexpected death, her son Herbert raised the stakes by converting Club Inferno to a black market establishment where guests and staff gathered to play sinister games that walk the thin line between life and death. Using Dante’s topology of hell as a map, they confront their mortality, desires, and anxieties in a world where evil deeds are no longer washed away by a purifying bath. In these games, there is no divine or natural power to forgive us our sins. Since Herbert's take-over, the club has mutated into a twisted parallel universe where most of the “inhabitants” are trapped, and rarely see the light of day. Rather, they are doomed to Dante’s circles of hell, living in limbo and sharing a collective psychosis that dissociates them from reality. Much like Vergil, Herbert Godeux guides us on a journey beyond the grave, urging us to abandon all hope and cross the river of Acheron.